TLDR: The Orbi firmware team needs to learn how to properly parse strings with spaces.
I just upgraded to 2.5.1.8 (from 2.3.5.30), and everything started going haywire:
- I kept getting disconnected every minute (or sooner) from the wireless network.
- I could barely even connect long enugh to make any changes in the admin console (192.168.1.1).
- I did manage to get a screenshot of the CPU usage which was spiking up between 70% – 100%.
I had to factory reset the whole thing. Eventually, I realized that the problem is a bug in the firmware that doesn't correctly handle spaces in the 5 GHz network SSID (wla_ssid).
I had previously set a separate SSID for my 5 GHz network, so my Orbi was actually functional in my home. When I upgraded to 2.5.1.8, a space in the SSID caused the CPU to go nuts and no device could stay connected to even the 2.4 GHz network. (All my HomeKit devices that require 2.4 GHz kept going offline.)
After a couple factory resets, I was able to determine that setting wla_ssid to something with a space caused this problem.
root@RBR50:/# config get wl_ssid
config get wl_ssid
Space Station
root@RBR50:/# config get wla_ssid
config get wla_ssid
Space Station
root@RBR50:/# config set wla_ssid="Space Capsule"
config set wla_ssid="Space Capsule"
root@RBR50:/# config get wl_ssid
config get wl_ssid
Space Station
root@RBR50:/# config get wla_ssid
config get wla_ssid
Space Capsule
root@RBR50:/# config commit
root@RBR50:/# reboot
Then after the Orbi restarted:
root@RBR50:/# config get wl_ssid
config get wl_ssid
Space Station
root@RBR50:/# config get wla_ssid
config get wla_ssid
Space
root@RBR50:/# config get wla_ssid
You'll see that the reported value for wla_ssid there is truncated after the space.
And the CPU spike and repeated disconnections I mentioned earlier:
https://i.imgur.com/AA5QMho.png
There also appears to be bugs with spaces in admin passwords, and spaces in security answers.
Part of what made this issue so utterly frustrating is that after I set things up, I was locked out of the admin console because the password the UI let me set was not accepted when i went to sign in to the admin console. I tried answering the security quesitons to reset the password, but it didn't accept my answers either. It was only after several factory resets that I tried replacing the spaces with hyphens in my password and answers to the security questions. It worked after that.
I spent an entire Sunday night wasting my time because your developers don't know forgot how to parse strings with spaces in them. It was never a probelm in previous firmware. My SSID, admin password, and answers to the security questions were the same for years.
This regression will not stand, man.
